Interview With An Atheist - Does God Exist?

In this episode, we interview Benjamin Watkins - an author, speaker, podcaster, and host  @RealAtheology . Ben walks us through his transition to atheism, gives some arguments in support of atheism, and exposes some philosophical problems with theistic systems. Regardless of your worldview, you will find this episode helpful and enlightening.

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0:00 Exploring Atheism and Philosophy with Benjamin Watkins

8:25 Defining Atheism: Beyond Lack of Belief to Rigorous Debate

14:31 Debunking Misconceptions About Atheism and Atheists

20:15 Exploring Atheism and Theism: Arguments and Philosophical Challenges

29:02 Debating Material Minds and the Spatial Location of Consciousness

32:27 Exploring Arguments for Atheism and Theism in Philosophical Debate

42:18 Experiencing a Total Solar Eclipse Is Awe-Inspiring and Terrifying

43:19 Exploring Hume's Argument From Design And Its Implications

47:26 Exploring Atheistic Ethics Through Rationality and Fairness

54:27 Faith and Rationality: A Philosophical Exploration

1:01:36 Essential Resources for Understanding Atheism and Its Philosophical Roots

Episode Transcript

(00:08):
Hello and welcome to another edition of Ideological.
I'm your host, Zach Lee. And today we have a special
guest I have Benjamin Watkins from Real A Theology here with
us. Ben, thanks so much for joining
us. Thank you so much for having me.
Man, I, I'm really excited aboutthis topic.
If, if this is your first time watching ideological, it's a

(00:29):
pretty true free speech platform.
So we interview people from different walks of life,
different worldviews, all kinds of stuff.
And today we're going to be talking about atheism.
And so before we jump in there, Ben, I want to turn it over to
you. Tell us a little bit about
yourself. Tell us about your upbringing,
how you became an atheist and specifically about real
atheology. One, one of the things that I

(00:50):
really enjoy about that is it itpromotes open dialogue in an
academic way that's not hostile.Cause I've seen a lot of people
that are religious that are justmudslinging and then I've seen
people that are non religious mudslinging.
You guys do a good job of reallyhaving true debate.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Yeah, so I grew up in a conservative Quaker like

(01:11):
community in Columbia, SC And soit's often called the two by
twos or the truth. And so it's more or less a non
denominational kind of house church.
And probably in my early to mid 20s I started to, you know, I

(01:33):
graduated from college. I was looking into things like
personal finance and looking at buying an engagement ring.
Like all the things that you do.Like once you graduate college,
you're like, OK, how do I get mylife in order and become an
adult? And so one of those big
questions was what my faith involved.
And so I just started asking different questions.

(01:56):
I was kind of at a crossroads with my faith.
You know, could I was dating someone who is now my wife.
And, you know, she was raised Catholic, so there was.
Celebrated an anniversary, right?
Didn't you celebrate an anniversary?
Yeah, we just had congratulations.
We called it our Transformers Transformer versary because I, I
asked her out to see Transformers 2.
Maybe not, maybe not the best movie to take someone on a date

(02:18):
on, but I'm really glad she saidyes.
It worked. I mean it worked.
You got. Her.
It worked, yeah. So I was really trying to
understand like, hey, am I, am Igoing to like convert to
Catholicism? Am I going to kind of double
down on the faith that I was raised in?
And so I just started asking questions about, hey, what are
the differences between the Catholic faith and the

(02:39):
Protestant faith that I was brought up in and just kind of,
you know, started pulling on strings.
And as I this was kind of in theheyday of YouTube, right before
streaming services came about, you know, about 2010 ish time
frame. So like there was a lot of
apologetics things available on YouTube as well as sites like

(03:06):
Closer to Truth. And then I bought some books.
And so as I started to dive intothat hole, my faith kind of just
started to erode. And so I guess there's, there's
really been three big pillars ofthat erosion.
And I guess, and they were therefrom the beginning.
And I guess they've always kind of they've, they've just stuck

(03:27):
with me through my philosophy journey as much as everything
else has fluctuated. Those 3 reasons kind of stood
out. And so the first was just the
obvious issue of religious pluralism.
So this idea that the world is religiously ambiguous, there's
widespread religious disagreement.
And that just seemed surprising given a particular atheistic

(03:51):
tradition, whereas that seemed like something expected on, you
know, like an atheism or a materialism, materialistic
naturalism. The second reason, big reason,
was the problem of evil. So in the apologetics resources
that I was, you know, diving into, they always address, you
know, no matter what they were talking about, they always had

(04:13):
something to say about the problem of evil.
So I knew it was a problem and Iwould just really found myself
dissatisfied with the replies that there were to that problem.
So that was a big one that kind of stuck out.
And then the third one is kind of the methodological naturalism
bit about, you know, the secularsuccess of science.
So science just seems to have progressed since the

(04:33):
Enlightenment and it's done so on secular grounds.
So we just didn't need, you know, it seemed like our best
explanatory theorizing just didn't need to make use of
theistic concepts. And again, I thought that was, I
thought that was pretty surprising, but given theism,
but you know, a matter of course, given an atheism or

(04:55):
materialistic naturalism. And so probably around 2011,
2012 ish, I kind of came to terms with the fact I was like,
OK, well, my, you know, I haven't gone through an agnostic
period. I was like, I think, I think I'm
in the, the atheist camp. But then I was really just deep
into philosophy and I discoveredmoral philosophy.

(05:15):
I discovered philosophy of science, I discovered philosophy
of mind. And so I was just kind of off to
the races with that. And then around 2017 I met or
no, it was probably about 2016. I met Justin Shieber who was at
the time of the podcast reasonable doubts.
And so when that project disbanded, he started what was

(05:39):
called real a theology. And so after some
correspondences back and forth, he invited me on to be one of
the Co hosts. And so we've been doing the Real
Atheology podcast ever since. And So what we want to do with
that project is exactly what youwere describing.
So it makes me feel good to hearthat people are taking away from

(05:59):
it what we intend, and that's toexplore questions in the
philosophy of religion in a way that is both rigorous but also
accessible to people on both atheist and theistic sides.
We want to expose kind of the intellectual side of the atheist
philosophy of religion because we think that both atheists and

(06:20):
theists have something to benefit from that in their
philosophical journeys. And we feel like we were filling
in kind of a a niche in the Internet that really just, you
know, there was a new atheism onone side and then there were,
you know, kind of the atheist podcasters on the other side.
But we didn't really feel like there was this really serious
engagement with the best arguments on the other side of

(06:45):
the aisle as well as there seemed to be a lot of burden of
proof dodging and, you know, kind of bad faith.
It's felt like on our own side. And so we wanted to raise the
level of discourse and not only model, but we think that
committed atheists should aspireto be in what they're in their

(07:10):
world building, but also to givetheists something to interact
with. Because it really felt like
there was a lot of theists, a real apologists out there that
that had studied arguments and that they really wanted to
engage with an intellectual side, you know, on the other
side of this and that. And, you know, they had to go,
you know, far and wide to try tofind that.

(07:32):
So we wanted to fill that hole, so to speak.
That's great. I appreciate you sharing that.
That's super helpful. Yeah, I, I've seen with real a
theology, there's a real desire to actually have good arguments,
find truth. It's not just the mudslinging,
it's not just the support, my camp.
I mean, it was even approved of by I, I think I saw a blurb from
William Lane Craig and some other stuff on y'all's on

(07:52):
y'all's website. And so also another thing that
Ben and I have in common. We both love David Hume and we
both have pictures of Albert Kimmel in our offices.
I have one too. So I'm a I'm a big, big myth of
Sisyphus and stranger guy. So very cool.
OK, so I think most people know what atheism is.
Obviously that's that's but chatwith us a little bit about is
that term even a fair label? It's one of those things when

(08:17):
you talk about presuppositions and kind of switching the burden
of proof and sorry if it gets loud.
It just started raining here. Switching the burden of proof
and this kind of stuff. Is that even a fair term?
Because it's defining a movementin response to another movement,
But that then assumes that theism's the default and theism
might not necessarily be the default.
Chat with us a little bit about the type of atheism.

(08:37):
You mean we're not talking aboutVictorian atheism.
We're not talking about the new atheism with Dawkins and Dennett
and Hitchens and those guys. This is a more kind of
thoughtful, engaging. I think you guys mentioned the
friendly atheism. Give me your thoughts on all
that. Yeah, so that's exactly right.
So First off, yeah, I think atheism is very much a fair
term. And so I will, I will be honest
with you, I'm kind of bewilderedby a lot of the animosity and

(09:02):
weird redefinition of atheism. So, and I think you're right to
want to kind of distinguish us from New Atheism and also kind
of the the atheism of the Enlightenment.
So a lot of, you know, people who were very clearly not
atheists in the sense that we mean like Spinoza or Diderot,

(09:27):
David Hume. Yeah, Hobbes, you know, these
were people who were very much accused of being atheists.
But I think that there was a very real sense in which they
were theists. And so we wanted to distinguish
ourselves from those enlightenment theists who were
unfair. They're mainly deistic.

(09:47):
They're mainly deistic. They just, but that's different.
And the kind of new atheist I I the term I use is Lac theist,
essentially not, you know, the non theist definition of atheist
and kind of steer a middle ground in what we my Co hosts
and people are part of my project.

(10:08):
We like to kind of call friendlyatheism or old atheism and in
the sense that we just deny thatthere are any gods.
And so we just kind of see it asa simple, we can raise the
question, does God exist or not?And it's kind of a binary

(10:28):
question. And so if you take one side, if
you take the positive side of this question, if you say there
is a God or there are gods or there is some sort of deity,
then you're a theist. And if you negate that claim,
you're an atheist. And then if you think that the
question is somehow indeterminate or unanswerable,
then you're an agnostic. And then that the term non

(10:49):
theist can just be used for someone who's not a theist.
They just so atheists and agnostics are both non theists.
But we really think that the, the, the position that is
interesting is the atheist position.
That's the position that we think that our apologetics peers
on the other side of this, they want to engage with, they want

(11:11):
to understand. And it's what we want to see
people online who are skeptical of traditional, traditional
religious beliefs to kind of have a familiarity with and use
in their repertoire of argumentsand skepticism instead of just
kind of playing the non theisticroute.

(11:36):
And so I, I guess I kind of have, I've kind of become known
as, as the guy who defends this rigorous definition of atheism,
which I'll be honest with you isa little embarrassing.
It's not exactly what I, I don'twant to be the guy known for a
definition. I'd like to be the guy known
for, you know, an interesting argument.
And so I've tried to combine that.

(11:57):
I've tried to give an interesting argument for the
definition of atheism. And so that argument roughly
goes like this, that theism should be defined as the
proposition that God exists. And so I think that's acceptable
to theists. I think that's acceptable to
atheists. You know, it's theists who are

(12:18):
saying God exists. And so if you say God exists,
you are a theist. The second premise is that
atheism should be defined in terms of theism.
So if if there were no theism, if you didn't have a concept of
theism, then there would be no atheism.
And I think most people, a grip both on both sides of this,
agree. Yeah.
Like if if there were no theistsin the world, then the idea of

(12:43):
having an atheist just seems kind of silly.
And then the third premise, the final premise is that the
proposition that God exists is not the psychological condition
of believing there is a God. It's a claim.
It's a proposition. It can be either true or it can
be false, and so from these three premises it follows that

(13:04):
atheism should not be defined asthe absence or lack of the
psychological condition of believing that God exists.
Yeah, we're talking about reality.
We're not just talking about psycho, you know, psychologism.
No. One's really interested in what
it is that you lack a belief in.That's an interesting question.
Is the proposition does God exist or not?
Like is that true or is that false?
Are there reasons to fall on either side of this question?

(13:25):
There's a technical sense of theterm theory.
The atheists will are very quickly, we're very quick to to
point this out, like if you use the term theory in a very fast
and loose sense, especially whenthe context of evolution,
they'll remind you there's a technical sense of theory.
And so I think there's a technical sense of atheism here.
I think that if we should be using the technical sense of and

(13:51):
the historical sense of the term, and if we're straying away
from that, I think we're just, we're we're inviting
opportunities for confusion and for people to talk past each
other. And those just aren't
interesting discussions. I agreed that was that was a
very helpful definition. I, I, I do appreciate the the
clarifiers. OK, that's mainly introduction.
Let's talk about the fun stuff. Many people have a false

(14:13):
presupposition when they think of someone as an atheist.
Can you chat with us about what some of those false
presuppositions are, why they'remisperceived?
I mean, because I, I think a lotof people, if you go back like
60 years ago and you hear someone's an atheist, you must
assume that maybe they're immoral or maybe they're angry
or whatever. And then, you know, I talked to
you and I'm like, this guy's delightful.
And so you know what I mean. So, so I think there's a lot of

(14:34):
misconceptions around an atheistdoesn't have a moral standard or
an atheist. And I, I've, I've heard friends
of mine that are very religious be like, oh, I think atheism is
dumb. And I'm like, listen, it is an
extremely coherent world view. You can't just dismiss it like
that. So chat with us about some of
the misperceptions people have of atheism and atheists in our
culture, and maybe why, why why those are like that.

(14:54):
Yeah. So I certainly think that the
first one that you mentioned is probably the big one that
somehow, you know, atheists are immoral or lack values, are
angry, bitter, nihilistic, even Certainly other misconceptions I

(15:15):
think are that atheists like secret secretly believe in
something, they're somehow self deceiving themselves or they're
merely rebellious for its own sake.
You certainly hear people say, you know, well, they just love
to sin. And so like the, you know, the
atheism is just a way to, you know, bring out the love of
their their sin that atheists are somehow intolerant or close

(15:38):
minded of people who are of religious faith.
So in some way that they, you know, want to persecute
religious believers or that atheists want to eradicate
religion. Like if they had, you know, they
could, they would just eliminatereligion from the world and that
the world would be a better place if they did that.
So with say, I guess I've kind of poisoned the well a little

(16:02):
bit here by saying that these are misconceptions.
But in one sense, I want to be fair to the other side in the
sense that these are not always misconceptions.
So I'm sure then, you know, there's certainly a minority of
atheists who fit some description like that.
Some atheists I'm sure, really are immoral, nihilistic,

(16:22):
rebellious, intolerant, you know, want to eradicate
traditional religion. I've certainly heard new atheist
types say things like this. So they're certainly not helping
the case that I want to make that these are largely
misconceptions. But I do, I think that these are
a minority though a very, there's a, there's a very vocal

(16:44):
minority that have beliefs like this.
I really think that the the driver for these misconceptions
are really just kind of everydayfacts about religion.
So we live in a religiously dominant society.
So religion plays a very centralrole in culture.

(17:06):
And rejection of that can seem threatening or abnormal.
So if it's a norm and you buck that norm, well, then by
definition, you're abnormal. And so that's just where that
kind of sticks because it's sucha minority.
You know, there's a lack of exposure.
If you're within religious circles, going outside of that

(17:27):
circle, you know, you might not encounter people who are openly
atheists. And so, you know, stereotypes
just kind of fill that gap. Media portrayals certainly.
So popular media often depicts atheists as, you know, villains,
caricatures, bitter skeptics, and so kind of reinforcing those

(17:49):
those stereotypes, stereotypes. You don't want that.
You want the Ricky Gervais. You want, you want the like, you
know, light hearted, funny, engaging.
Yeah. I also think that there's it has
something to do. This has to do with philosophy
in general. So not necessarily atheist, but
philosophy more generally. There's a general part of human

(18:13):
nature that there's a fear of uncertainty.
So uncertainty I think makes people uncomfortable.
Doubting makes people uncomfortable.
And so religious belief systems provide existential security,
and atheism's lack of supernatural assurances can seem

(18:33):
unsettling, cold, distant, abnormal.
I mean, that's, that's Freud andFeuerbach.
I mean, Freud and Feuerbach havethe thesis that that is you.
You are creating that safety blanket of taking your dad,
making him big so you feel better.
Yeah, I'm not saying that this is the the primary driver, but I
think it's one, at least one contributing factor.
And then of course the the class, you know, group out

(18:56):
identity. So there's in groups and there's
out groups. And so with religion, there's an
in Group and they form a social identity.
And so, you know, disbelief can be misread as a betrayal or
moral failure of atheists. And so, yeah, I think those are

(19:18):
probably the, you know, the biggest contributors to the
misconceptions surrounding atheists.
And of course, you know, us on the in the atheist camp who
think about these sort of thingsseriously and are you know, many
of us have very religious familymembers.
Many of our best friends are of theist persuasion.

(19:41):
You know, it's conversations aremuch more interesting with
people that you agree disagree with than than if what you agree
with. And so we we can't help but
chuckle at a lot of these misconceptions because, and
certainly I think, I think our theist friends, you know, kind
of roll their eyes and, you know, like, OK, well, clearly my
atheist friends aren't like, youneed to get out more like my

(20:03):
atheist atheist friends aren't like that at all.
And so hopefully we're playing our small little part with real
atheology and kind of, you know,undoing those misconceptions in
the best way we can. Yes, thank you.
Helpful clarifiers. OK, Can you chat with us a
little bit about some pause the next two questions I'll just
kind of combine and and you can take it wherever you want.

(20:25):
Can you chat with us a little bit about some positive
arguments for atheism and then conversely can chat with us a
little about some negative arguments against theism?
So I think in the atheism versustheism conversation, there's
both the defending and building a case for yourself and then
there's the polemics of poking holes in kind of the other side.
And so I, I think a lot of people probably listening to

(20:45):
this have not heard, hey, I needto hear AI want to hear a case
for atheism, but I also want to hear problems with theism.
Most people, well, most people don't think about things like
this, but they should. And then when they do, typically
it's a, it's a quickly written off answer or something because
they just want to stay in their camp.
Give me some of your thoughts onpositive and negative when it
comes to, you know, positive foratheism.

(21:06):
And then maybe some of the problems that you see with with
theistic arguments. Yeah, sure.
So I First off, I think you're you're exactly right to kind of
make the distinction that you did in the sense that there's on
the one side the building of a positive worldview and then
there's kind of the critique of the theistic case.
Because we there's a potential pitfall here.

(21:29):
You know, if we've defined atheism as disbelief in theism,
you know, positive arguments foratheism and negative arguments
for theism are going to be one in the same argument.
So an argument for atheism is going to be an argument against
theism and an argument against theism is going to be an
argument for atheism. So if we want to cash this

(21:50):
distinction out in something, you know, distinct, I think
you're exactly right that we have to look at one side as
building up positive cases, a positive worldview, whereas the
other side of this is trying to critique what is often called
natural theology. And even this, there's potential

(22:13):
pitfalls here because natural theology isn't the only camp on
the other side. So there's, there's three main
traditions on the theistic side.So there's the natural theology
side, which says that, you know,through human reason alone,
through something like science, we can discover theologically
significant truths about God. So this is where you're going to

(22:34):
find things like ontological arguments, cosmological
arguments, teleological arguments, moral arguments.
All the all the things that Humeaddresses in his Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion, basically.
Exactly. So natural religion, natural
theology, those are going to be kind of go hand in hand.
But there's two other important traditions that I think are
certainly worth mentioning. So there's the what's often

(22:57):
called the presuppositionalist. Yeah, that's the Reformed
apologetics. Start off with God's belief.
Alvin Planiga stuff. Well, not quite Alvin Planiga,
but I I see why we we would get there.
But he's a he's a he. Identified himself as a a
reformed epistemologist in the presupposition thing, but I know
what you mean. He's not the same as the rest.
Yeah. He's not like a Vandalian or a
Greg Bonson or so they're, they're following in the

(23:20):
footsteps of steps of Kent. So Immanuel Kent has this, you
know, famous transcendental idealism and is saying like,
look, there's, there's these categories of the mind.
They're like glasses that we can't take off.
And so we just can't help but see the world in things like
space-time, causation. And so one of those categories

(23:42):
of the mind is going to be Christian theism.
And so that if you were to take Christian theism out of the
picture, well, then you're just your worldview is reduced to
absurdity. It'd be like taking space-time
or causation out of your system.And then the third tradition
would be kind of a mystical tradition or reformed
epistemology position, like Alvin Plantiga's position, where

(24:07):
look, argument, and evidence arenot necessary for the
rationality of belief. So we can be directly aware of
religious reality through a special faculty of the mind,
what he calls a census divinitatus.
So we can we can come into direct context.
So even the most lay person who is completely unfamiliar with

(24:32):
philosophy or epistemology or science more generally, even
they can have an understanding of and knowledge of God just
because of this faculty. And so I think there's one
tradition of atheism that's going to be skeptical of these

(24:53):
theistic traditions. And they're going to offer our,
you know, responses to things like the ontological argument.
They're going to cosmological, teleological, moral, they're
going to engage with those arguments.
They're going to try to build upa system of rationality that
doesn't involve Christian theism, or they're going to have

(25:13):
some sort of not Reformed theology, but, you know, just
standard epistemology where there isn't this special, you
know, there is no census divinitatus.
But I think it's much more interesting because you can find
Christians who disagree with oneanother on Reformed epistemology

(25:36):
versus natural theology versus presuppositionalism.
So there's already good conversations having in house
among theists. What I think theists really want
is what you initially talked about, that positive case for
atheism. And I've already kind of hinted
at it with the three reasons, you know, that kind of eroded my
faith. So the first is the problem of

(25:59):
evil. So that's kind of the big dog in
the house, in the sense that if you're a philosophically
informed theist who's writing inany capacity about the
rationality of theism, you have to say something about the
problem of evil. And I would say that's probably
the biggest one. Would you agree that?
That is the biggest one. It's certainly the one that's

(26:19):
the hardest. 1. It's the biggest stumbling
block, practically. Like, you know, when you find
people who were formerly believers and they've lost their
faith, majority of the time, they're going to say some
variation of a problem of evil. And so I think that's kind of
the big, the big dog in the house.
And it's in one way misleading because it makes it sounds like

(26:42):
there's a single problem, whereas like cosmological and
teleological arguments, there's a family of arguments, and so
there's different ways of dividing them.
Different things claim to accomplish different things by
taking different facts for granted.
The second one is probably the second most cited. 1 is the

(27:05):
problem of religious ambiguity. Ambiguity, so of what's often
called the problem of divine hiddenness.
So this idea that God seems hidden or at least his existence
is ambiguous in a way that causes all of this religious
disagreement. And so again, something has to
be said in response to that, butalso the atheist needs to put

(27:27):
some put forward some sort of positive argument.
What does an argument from religious ambiguity look like?
And then I think that there's the natural success of science,
so the secular success of the natural sciences, I should say.
So there's what's often called methodological natural

(27:50):
naturalism. So it's this idea that unless
it's a last resort, we're not going to make use of a
supernatural explanations because supernatural
explanations have such a poor track record from the unlike.
Yeah. If you get appendicitis, you
don't pray, you go to the hospital.
Yeah, So, yeah, like exactly so and so that that's just

(28:12):
surprising, though. We would have thought that as
science unfolded, we would have to take into account divine
actions or the actions of unembodied spirits or the
efficacy of prayer. Like this would just be a
variable in our research that just in the last analysis
doesn't seem to be 1. But again, what that argument

(28:35):
actually looks like and actuallyamounts to this is where the
the, the atheist has some more work.
And so one of the areas where I've done work in atheist
philosophy of religion is to give another argument.
So there's those, those three main ones.
But I've, I actually just recently contributed to a debate

(28:57):
book where I wrote a chapter on what I call the argument from
material Minds. So it's the idea that mental
causation, the idea that minds influence the world, implies
that our minds are at least physically dependent on an
embodied brain. And so that that this is some

(29:19):
evidence for atheism against theism.
Because on theism we would have expected that our minds could
exist entirely independently of anything material, and so that
we would have had an immaterial soul.
And so it's basically the old hat of trying to resolve dualism
versus materialism in the philosophy of mind and that.

(29:40):
Freaking Descartes, dude. He just, I just need, he's so
smart. I just need him to solve it.
Yeah, but you don't appeal to the pineal gland, though.
You, you have you have somethingthat's a little more informed.
Yeah, yeah. So, but it's basically, so if
you were to go into a, you know,talk to a philosopher of mind or
you were to go into a neuroscience department.

(30:01):
So you're going to have to search far and wide to find a
committed dualism. So dualism has fallen on hard
times. It's had something of a
resurgence in the past 30 years or so.
But most philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, cognitive
scientists, psychologists are some form of what's called
ontological physicalist. So now they might, they, you can

(30:24):
divide that up further. They might, you know, there's
property dualism, there's neutral monism.
There's a whole gambit of just different views within the
philosophy of mind and certainlya lot of room for disagreement.
But what all philosophers of mind generally disagree,
generally agree on is that mindsare spatially located.
So my mind is here in Virginia. Your mind is there.

(30:44):
I'm not actually sure where you're located.
I'm in Texas, I'm in Texas and Dallas under a storm right now.
So yes, that's what we have. Your mind is located in Texas.
My mind is located in Virginia. They're spatially located and so
the spatial location is a physical property.
So my our minds are at least depended on one physical
property. Space.
Let let me let me clarify something just for that.

(31:05):
And it's just in case some of the people watching aren't as
familiar. In philosophy we distinguish
between mind and brain. Brain is the grey matter in your
head that weighs a certain number of pounds.
Mind has to do with your conscious experiences.
So if you think of a pink elephant and we do an MRI, we
don't see that pink elephant in your brain because it supposedly
is not physical. But if that's the case, how can
it move your physical body? How can you interact, etcetera.

(31:25):
So one of the things that that Benjamin's talking about is
trying to understand the material aspects of how the mind
is dependent upon the brain and IE physicality.
Like you said, if my mind is nota spatial, if it's if it's
immaterial, then why is it not away from me?
Or, you know, like I can raise my hand, but like, why can't I

(31:49):
raise your hand? And so you can't say, well,
because you're in Texas and I'm in Virginia.
Well, but if mines aren't spatially located, that
shouldn't be irrelevant. It wouldn't matter.
Yeah, it'd be Wi-Fi. Now, I'm not saying that this
argument is decisive. So I've, I've, I very quickly
admit that this is what's calleda prima facie reason.
So there might be, you might saythat look, there's other

(32:11):
evidences like this might be a chip that falls in the atheist
camp. There's all these other chips
that fall in the theist camp. And so I would certainly can see
that it's not a decisive argument.
It's not a what's called an all things considered conclusion.
So those are the four arguments that I would want to mention for

(32:32):
atheism, the argument from evil,widespread religious
disagreement, or what's called the the problem of divine
hiddenness, the secular success of the natural sciences, and
then the argument from physical minds.
And so I think those are, you know, 4 pretty good arguments to
be an atheist or a naturalist, metaphysical naturalist.

(32:56):
So the idea that the material world is causally closed,
there's nothing from outside of the material world that comes in
and bumps around and move stuff in the material world.
But the other, again, the other side of the coin, we mentioned
arguments from natural theology.So what does it look like to

(33:16):
argue against theism? And so I think that really
starts again with, I've already mentioned Immanuel Kant once, so
I might as well mention him again.
So we have a division of arguments that we kind of
inherit from Kent, and he divides them into ontological

(33:37):
arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological
arguments, and moral arguments. And so why does he divide them
up this way? And so I think he actually has a
pretty good, what pretty good reasons for dividing them up the
way he does. So the ontological argument
tries to argue for God from pureconcepts.
So he tries to take things like definitions, things that are

(33:58):
known, what's called a priori prior to experience, and moving
from the idea of God to the existence of God.
The cosmological argument startsfrom the idea of general
existence. So the idea that there's that
there's something rather than nothing, the whole of reality is
contingent. And so then tries to infer the

(34:21):
existence of God from that very general fact and that, you know,
God is the sustaining cause of the world, or it is choice that
creates the world. You know he's the first cause of
the world. Or taking us today and going
backwards, there is cause and effect, cause and effect, cause
and effect. If it goes on forever, we'd

(34:43):
never get here today. So there has to be, you know,
what Aristotle would call an unmoved mover kind of thing.
Yeah, exactly. Or God is the sufficient reason
why there is something rather than nothing.
So you could appeal to somethinglike the principle of sufficient
reason. So ontological argument, this
idea that, you know, essence kind of implies existence.
Cosmological argument, No, we infer God's essence from

(35:07):
existence. So it's not that essence implies
existence. We infer his essence from the
existence. And then the teleological
argument is that there instead of the general fact of essence,
there are these particular factsthat are best explained by the
agency or intention of God. So you know the universe is

(35:28):
ordered the way it is, or biological organisms have the
features that they do because God chose for them to have it
and willed them to be. And then there's the moral
argument. So you had from concepts
existence, particular causal facts about the world, but then
there are these non causal factsabout value and there's again a

(35:52):
family of arguments here. So the one can't use a specific
specifically is that there's this what's called the dualism
of black practical reason. So it seems that self-interest
and impartial benevolence are kind of on a collision course.
So is it always going to be in myself interest to act moral?
What aligns that? And so he gave God that role.

(36:14):
He brings into accord self-interest and morality.
Others are probably more familiar with William Lane
Craig's moral argument, the ideathat God is the ground of moral
value and moral duty, or what's often a it's kind of a variation

(36:37):
of a teleological argument, but moral knowledge.
So the idea that we can reliablycome to moral knowledge.
God has designed the world so insuch a way that we can have
reliable moral knowledge. God writes the moral law in our
heart kind of thing. And so I think those are the,
the BIG4 arguments that I think atheists need to have like one,

(37:01):
they need to be able to articulate the, what they
believe to be the strongest formulation of each of those
arguments. And I don't mean like an
obviously fault. You know, everything has a
'cause you know, God, everythingthat is, everything that exists
has a 'cause God exists. So God has a cause.

(37:21):
No, that's not the strongest form of A cause.
Yeah. Don't straw man it.
Don't straw man, Yeah? Don't, don't do that.
But then there's an honorable mention that I would throw in
there, and that's the argument from religious experience.
So they at the end of the day, alot of people, the rationality
of their belief doesn't hinge onthese abstract philosophical

(37:43):
arguments. It hinges on what people
perceive to be religious experiences.
And so I think that you have to,one, be able to formulate what
an argument from religious experience would look like.
And you're going to have to givesome sort of Natural History of
religion. You're going to have to explain
why it is that people have religious experiences at all

(38:05):
'cause, you know, religious experiences are surprising given
atheism or naturalism. And so they're now you might
tell some story and psychological story, you might
tell some evolutionary story. You have to say something
because most people are religious and through most of
history people have had religious experiences And so as,

(38:28):
as a phenomena that I just, I don't think you can ignore.
So you might not be able to classify it in those other 4
arguments. That's why I put it as kind of
an art, an honorable mention, because it usually gets turned
into what Alvin plantica, what we mentioned, you know, it's our
census divinitatus. We have religious experiences
and that's our census divinitatus.
So it might not even itself be an argument.

(38:50):
It's, you know, we don't have anargument against external world
skepticism. We just believe there is an
external world, something similar to that.
Yeah. So just like we can believe
stalipsism is false even though if we don't have a knock down
argument against it, we can believe that our religious
experiences are vertical even ifwe don't have a knock down

(39:10):
argument for the verticality of our religious experiences.
So I think you, I think the atheist has an epistemic duty to
say something about that. Hello, that's super helpful.
I actually one time drove Alvin plan to get to the airport and I
was trying to push on his epistemology pretty strong
because it doesn't really need rationality, it just starts with
being true. What do you call properly basic?

(39:32):
That's right. Yeah.
Properly basic beliefs your youryour mental cognitive faculties
are working correctly even if you don't have a proof for it.
For the same reason that you cansay you had breakfast this
morning knowing that you don't have to have Cartesian certainty
to do so. Of those arguments.
You. I'm going to jump down to
another question you're saying, because I think it's helpful of
those arguments you mentioned sothat you're right, the big four.
And then there's other other ones we can throw on, but

(39:54):
teleological, moral, ontologicaland cosmological, which ones do
you think are the strongest? Or what do you think the
strongest case for theism is? And then which ones do you think
are not as because there's a response to each of those.
So Kant saying that being can't be predicated, it's assumed, or
an ontological, or Hume saying that just because there's
causation within a system, that doesn't allow you to jump and
say there's causation of the whole system or teleology where

(40:18):
if you look around at the world,some of it looks great and some
of it looks super messed up. And so there's there's all kinds
of issues. Which ones do you think are
stronger, not strong? Maybe the strongest case you
think for theism isn't that likeyou said, maybe it's religious
experience. Maybe it's that census
divinitatus from from Calvin andthen obviously others quoted
after him. What do?
What do you think? So I kind of want to split this

(40:39):
question up into two because I, I think so if we were to ask
like, what argument do I think has the most potential to
convince me to be a theist? Because at the end of the day, I
want to be a theist. So I think there's something to
be said about an infinitely loving being who wants to have a
meaningful relationship with youof infinite value.

(41:01):
Like that sounds like a pretty good deal.
May not be on the board with thewhole infinite life thing
because that might turn into infinite boredom but under the
assumption that there would be an infinitely non bored
relationship, I feel pretty pretty on board with this idea.
So I think the argument from religious experience is the one

(41:23):
that's most has the most potential to convert me because
I think that if I were to have this really cogent religious
experience, that's something that would move me.
I, I tell this story frequently.In 2017, I had the opportunity
to witness a total solar eclipse.

(41:43):
And so I travel back home to seeit And just to tell the people
in your audience, like I know, I'm aware that you've seen solar
eclipses and textbooks and on television, what you see in real
life is not captured in the slightest by any video camera or

(42:04):
camera anything like when you experience it, it is unlike any
other experience that you've had.
And I remember just being dumbstruck by the experience of
seeing this thing. I don't know if you've
experienced seeing a total. We, we had one actually in the
Dallas area about a year ago where it's totally out.
The cricket start chirping, the weather gets cooler.

(42:24):
It's insane. So you did see it?
So you did see it. Yeah, it's it's it is like once
in a lifetime. It's powerful.
Very highly recommend seeing it if you get the chip.
But I do know, or at least I believe if I had seen that five
year, 500 years ago and I didn'tknow what that was, I would have
been like, God is very real and he is very pissed.

(42:47):
And we are like, that would haveabsolutely like, I would have
been awestruck and it would havebeen just nothing but terror
that followed that. So I think I've experienced like
something like that. Like if I were, you know, like
Hamlet and I saw this ghost of my father sort of ill and he
was, you know, telling me about how my father, you know, I'd

(43:10):
been murdered by my uncle. I, you know, that that's
probably going to move me. But now, short of that, what do
I think is the strongest argument?
Not necessarily the one that hasthe most potential to change my
mind, but what I think on philosophical grounds alone is
the strongest brings me right back to David Hume and his
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

(43:31):
And it's the argument from design.
So I think in his in his dialogues, there's what's often
called Hume's strange inversion.So he he spends all this time
beating up Clanthes and his natural theology, only to at the
end of that dialogue, say that he is a theist or an attenuated

(43:52):
deist of sorts, and that there'ssome resemblance to human
artifacts in the world in nature.
And so that the argument from design succeeds in to some
extent. And I think I you have to, I
have to go back and check it, but it's either in Section 3 or
Section 4 of the Dialogue. Planthes makes the point to Hume

(44:17):
that there's just seems something natural about the idea
that the world is designed and that it resembles designed, or
it just strikes us with the force of something that's
designed. And there, if you look
throughout the Dialogues, Philo doesn't really have the the

(44:39):
Clanthus puts forward a regular design argument and in this
irregular design argument. And so Philo smashes this
regular design argument, but he doesn't have much to say about
that irregular design argument. And I think there's something to
be said about that irregular design argument.
And I think Hume saw it too. And I think that's what explains
Hume's strange inversion at the end of design arguments.

(45:03):
And I actually, and I also thinkit's what creationists latch
onto and really play on the force of that, you know,
they'll, you know, put somethingup and they'll go, you know,
look how a bumblebee is able to fly and pollinate these flowers.
And look how, you know, DNA is coded in this, in these exact

(45:24):
sequences. And there's a specified
complexity or irreducible complexity.
And it just strikes us with the force of something that seems
designed. And so I think there's something
to be said. I think that's a very powerful
intuition. And so I think that gives.
If I had to say which one has the the most forced
philosophically, I would give itto the argument from design.

(45:47):
I appreciate that and and just also recap for the audience.
So in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, one of the
things that Hume points out though, is the only kind of
creator you can infer is the onefrom what you see, which means
you can't infer an infinite being.
You only see what's finite. You can't infer one God.
You only see things that are plural.
You can't, you know, have a perfectly intelligent God
because you have a messed up world.

(46:09):
And if you say it's messed up because of sin, you've done a
circular argument. So, but you're right, at the
end, he does. Hume is pretty good at being
like, listen, I've got all thesedoubts and I've got all these
questions, but it's not perfect.I don't know what to do with
this thing. And he also kind of wants to
save his butt and be a professorat Edinburgh.
But yeah, so I that's the. Intelligent design advocates
pretty much I think are on the same page with Hume on this.

(46:29):
And so they go look, we, we might not be able to know much
about the intelligent designer. You might just be like what all
you said. You might be finite.
He might be doing his best. He might be some dotted,
attenuated deity who's ashamed of the product that he's made,
but we can still get to an intelligent designer.
There's still there, still seemsto.
Be telos purpose right we we don't just say birds fly South

(46:51):
and therefore avoid the winter They we say they do that in
order to avoid the winter like we we try yeah so you're right
it's. Natural in our language.
Yeah, it is. OK, Let me ask you this one
'cause you've also done a lot ofwork in this area and I saw some
of your stuff online that I thought was fascinating.
Tell me, what is your view of ethics and what are some ethical
systems that work within an atheistic worldview?

(47:12):
I think people think if you don't have divine command
theory, which runs into the Euthyphro dilemma anyway, that
you don't have any system of ethics or whatever.
But you, you've come up with a pretty cogent and strong ethical
system. Can you chat with us a little
bit about atheism and ethics? Yeah.
So first I want to say that. So I think that any ethical

(47:35):
system works within an atheisticworldview, except those systems
that are explicitly theologically based.
Yes. So utilitarianism and day
ontology and all that would still work, Yeah.
Yeah. So my own ethical persuasions
are realist or objectivist, and I'm most sympathetic to Plato.

(47:59):
I'll mention Kent again, Immanuel Kent and the
utilitarian Henry Sidgwick. More contemporarily, people like
Derek Perfect, Tim Scanlon, JohnRawls, the famous veil of
ignorance. And so at the end of the day,

(48:20):
what I think that morality is grounded in the, what morality
consists of the, the, the parts of morality, so to speak, are
reason and fairness. So reason broadly.
So the, you know, the standards of rationality and fairness by

(48:41):
what I mean by impartial deliberation.
And so a moral point of view is one that's consistent with
reason and does not endorse arbitrary partiality.
So on my view, kind of the the slogan form is to be moral is to
be fair, and to be fair is to berational.

(49:03):
So fair deliberation is the bridge from rational thought to
moral action. And so I take myself as
following in the footsteps of Plato, Kent and Sedgwick in
that. And even to an extent David
Hume, even though David Hume andI don't share the same meta
ethics, I think he gets that part wrong.

(49:26):
He did. There is a place for reason and
impartiality in his system of ethics as well.
And so I recently did a debate with a friend of mine, Darwin to
Jesus on. Secular on on Twitter now X but
yeah. Yeah, now X.
It's like a four hour debate or something.

(49:47):
You guys are going? Yeah, yeah.
Well, so Darwin and Daniel is his is his real name.
But Darwin to Jesus and I, we wrote opening statements and
rebuttals and we exchanged both of them beforehand.
So we did that so that we talkedpast each other minimally in

(50:12):
those, you know, the opening andrebuttal periods.
But also it gave us room to haveas much open discussion as we
did because we would understand each other's views as as well as
possible. And give, you know, people who
are only interested in the opening statements and the
rebuttals. They could listen to it for an

(50:33):
hour and then they were good. But people who wanted to go
deeper, we were going to be ableto give them that kind of that
clash of arguments because he's a divine command theorist.
And so the view of ethics that Ihave kind of roughly goes like
this. So we can have things in our

(50:55):
interests and other people can have things in their interests
and these interests can conflict.
And so morality is its most interesting and moral theorizing
is that its most difficult when we try to resolve those
disagreements or tensions in between conflicting interests.
And so rationality requires us to reject any moral principle

(51:18):
that is supported only by question begging arguments.
And so then I want to say that egoism and pure altruism, egoism
being always prioritizing our own interests and pure altruism
being always prioritizing everyone else's interests, are
supported only by question begging arguments.

(51:41):
And that impartial fairness avoids question begging because
it gives no arbitrary priority to any party's interests.
It demands that it's demands areones that to again come back
circle back to Derek Parfit. Everyone could rationally will
that's Kent would make things goimpartially best.

(52:02):
That's consequentialism Sedgwickand no one could reasonably
reject. So that's contractualism and
Scanlon. And so from these three premises
it follows that when relevant interests conflict, we
rationally ought to reject egoism and pure altruism and
accept some form of impartial fairness.

(52:24):
And so the supreme principle of morality, all other moral
principles follow from this supreme principle of morality,
which is a principle of fairness.
And so this is objective in the same way that rationality is
objective. So it's an objective truth that
we shouldn't contradict ourselves and that we shouldn't
object or reject the conclusionsof sound arguments.

(52:47):
And so we also shouldn't treat people unfairly.
And that when we act immorally, not only are we acting in a way
that we shouldn't act, we are act, we are acting irrational.
And so that's Kent again. And so that's broadly my moral
view. Yeah.

(53:08):
And you can see that if you if you want to see it more online,
I think you've posted your that that initial kind of talking
points for that debate that's that's on.
Debate brief has it in a nice one page little summary of what
it is. And so, and again, this, this
isn't unique to me. Like this isn't material that

(53:31):
I've been original in creating. So I mean, this started with
Plato through Kent Sedgwick was trying to do this.
This is what people like Parfit,Scanlon, Rawls, Sturba, modern
ethicists, you know, this is, I'm standing on their shoulders.
Out of all the ethical theories that I've considered and the

(53:52):
moral philosophy that I've gone through, this is what I found to
be the most compelling ethical theorizing.
OK, I've got two more questions for us here.
Wait, I actually just thought ofsomething just now that I
thought might be interesting. I want to ask this too.
You mentioned the teleological argument and experience.
One of my favorite philosopher'sa guy named Pierre Bale.
He's a French Enlightenment thinker and he himself is a

(54:14):
Calvinist. And he But yet when it comes to
faith, he thinks he thinks it isincompatible with rationality.
He thinks that you can have faith or you can have
rationality, but you cannot try to put the two together.
He thinks you know so much the worst for rationality.
Others think so much the worst for faith.
Is there a sense in which do youhow much of this debate do you

(54:35):
think is about rationality and what it what about it is super
rational or non rational? I asked that just in the context
of my next question here is about how theist and atheist,
religious and non religious people can better dialogue with
each other. But I But I also want to know
your thoughts on is is faith stuff rational?
Is it irrational? Is it super rational 'cause I I

(54:57):
agree. I think what's interesting is I
don't know very many religious people that got that way after
doing symbolic logic. I don't know very many people
that did that after reading CS. It was an experience.
They felt something, they had a grandmother die.
I actually kind of wonder if that happens both ways, that
somebody that converts or deconverts usually happens at a
major point in their life because something happened.

(55:19):
Give me your thoughts on that. Yeah.
So I, I actually take an opposite line of Pierre Pierre
Bale on this one, much to the dismay, I think of my atheist
peers. I, they very much don't like me
being so sympathetic and friendly to concepts of faith.
But I actually think that this is an area where I've been

(55:42):
influenced a great deal by Kierkegaard.
And so I think that faith and rationality to some extent go
hand in hand in that you can't have one without the other.
They're two sides of the same coin.
And so why do I think that? So the the easiest way to kind

(56:03):
of flesh this out is to go back to an ancient problem called
Agrippa's paradox, or what's offnowadays more often called
Mukhausen's trilemma. So the bootstrapping analogy,
So, you know, this is this guy, he's stuck on his horse in mud.
And so he lifts himself out of the mud by his bootstraps, and

(56:24):
that's how he gets out of the mud.
And so obviously, if you think about that, you go, OK, well,
that doesn't really make sense. Well, unfortunately, you know,
kind of epistemology, Agrippa's paradox forces us to kind of
have to do something similar with epistemology.
So there's this famous concept of knowledge that involves

(56:46):
justified true belief. And so I think Edmund Gittier
pretty successfully showed that these aren't sufficient for
knowledge. But I think everyone would still
pretty much agree that these arenecessary for knowledge.
Like you can't know something unless you believe it, can't
really know it if you if you can't justify it, and you
certainly don't know it if it's not true.

(57:07):
So it can't be false and you know it well.
So belief and truth can be not so interesting in this context.
What's really interesting is justification.
And so the question becomes, where does justification end?
So is it turtles all the way down?
Is every true claimed justified by another true claim ad

(57:29):
infinum? So that doesn't seem like it's
going to work. Does one claim justify another
claim, and that claim justifies this claim?
Well, that's just circular, and so circular arguments don't
support their conclusions. So we're not going to be able to
justify claims in a circle. So that's not going to work

(57:51):
well. The only other options, so those
are two options. There's three options.
The only other options is that there's something intrinsically
justifying, there's something self-evident, there's something
that we just take as true without any further
justification. That's just faith.
So at some point justification comes to an end.

(58:16):
At some point Wittgenstein has this famous saying, you know,
like at some point like I'm digging with a spade, but at
some point I can dig no further.My spade is turned and I this is
simply what I do. And so I think that's the
appropriate place. So I don't think the infinite
regress can work. I don't think the circular

(58:37):
argument can work. So this puts me in that third,
what's called the foundationalist camp, where
things something just is intrinsically justified.
And I think that's a form of faith that there's just
something that you say, OK, likeif you were to ask me like,
well, why shouldn't you believe a contradiction?

(58:57):
OK, well, I guess that's just what I have.
Like I have faith that you shouldn't believe contradiction.
So you're saying in a sense likelike the cogito even or some
sort of logical axiom law of noncontradiction.
There's a sense in which you're still appealing to faith for
that, even though it's irrefutable.
And, and so I, I think we're, you know, this is what I mean
by, you know, I got to this conclusion by rationality.

(59:21):
And I can't get out of this paradox without something like
faith. So this rationality and faith
are going to have to go hand in hand or I have to admit
knowledge is impossible. I don't know anything because
nothing's, you know, nothing's justified.
And so if nothing's justified, Idon't meet the necessary

(59:43):
conditions of knowledge. So all knowledge is impossible.
And that seems an even more, youknow, I would much rather follow
the infinite regress or the circular argument before I go
knowledge is impossible. You know that one.
Just I don't have enough faith to do that to use the cliche.

(01:00:04):
Term and so I I'm much more sympathetic to faith, what
Kierkegaard called the leap of faith or leap into faith that at
some point, like rationality will only get you so far.
And then when I live my day-to-day life, I don't make
decisions. But you know, there's a lot of
uncertainty in, in life. Arguments are not the main

(01:00:26):
vehicles in which get me throughliving life.
That's not why I decided I didn't decide to marry my wife
because of a logical syllogism or because I sat down and did
some, you know, I took a leap offaith.
And so I think that there is an appropriate place in one's
epistemology for faith. Not only do I think there's an
appropriate place, I think it's necessary.

(01:00:47):
I think that to try to lay out an epistemology that makes no
appeal to anything that looks like faith is just a fool's
errand. Like I just, I don't think
you're going to be able to do it.
Very good. Let me ask you one more question
and then we'll, we'll be done. And this has been fantastic, by
the way. Again, I, I know you don't know
me, but I, I appreciate you and I appreciate you taking the time

(01:01:09):
to, to chat with us. What are some good resources you
would recommend on atheism? Maybe some primary sources and
some secondary sources for people that just want to
wrestle, whether it's I've got for my audience, I've got
Christians, atheists, Jews, I'vegot a bunch of different kinds
of people. But for people that are more
interested in wanting to learn more about atheism, other than
obviously the resources at Real Atheology, what are some other

(01:01:31):
resources that you would recommend for them to to to
maybe start with? So this is this is probably my
favorite question because I havesomething of a, of a of a Canon
that I like. So I've got, I've got a list of
10 books, but then I swear I'll just name off those books, but
then I'll narrow it down to three to talk about.

(01:01:52):
So the first is Derirum Natura by Lucretius.
So that's just it. It makes you realize that
materialism is something ancient.
It has a rich tradition. And so that modern day
materialism, naturalism, physicalism is an ancestor.

(01:02:13):
It has its precursors in figureslike Lucretius, and it's
incredibly well written. So in ancient times, philosophy
was both an art and a science, and writing was both an art and
a science and Lucretius could doboth.
And it's so it's just very well.Obviously a lot of it's

(01:02:35):
outdated, but it's still a very,very good read.
Another one is on the Nature of the Gods by Kikoro.
So again, we're missing a good, good portions of that, but still
what we have fragmented is very,very good.
I'm so excited that you said hisname correctly instead of
Cicero. I appreciate that you used the
correct Latin pronunciation. As a nerd, I appreciate that.

(01:02:56):
Yeah, and I'm, I'm just glad I'm, I didn't embarrass myself
by saying Descartes. Oh.
You crushed it. No, you crushed it.
Don't worry about that. Yeah.
You don't want to do. Yeah, no worries.
Theological Political Treaty treatise by Baruch Spinoza.
Very, very great work. That's really a precursor to

(01:03:16):
what atheism as we understand itnow and religious textual
criticism. My personal favorite Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion by David Hume, The Essence of
Christianity by Ludwig Theobach,Thus Spoke Zarathustra by

(01:03:36):
Frederick Nietzsche. So that's that's a that's a
classic one, The Faith of a Heretic by Walter Kaufman.
So most of the translations of Nietzsche that we have are by
Walter Kaufman. And the faith of the faith of a
heretic is wonderful. More on the continental side of
things. And so it's nice to mix things
up. The miracle theism by JL Mackey

(01:03:59):
and Logic and theism by JH Sobeland then Arguing about Gods by
Graham Opie. And so if I had to pick 3, well,
actually, if I had to pick one, if you could only read one of
these, make it David Hume's dialogue considering natural
Religion. So I think that is the greatest
work of philosophy ever written in English.

(01:04:20):
So if you're looking for philosophy that was originally
written in English, you're not going to do better than David
Hume's dialogue considering natural religion.
And I think all of contemporary philosophy of religion is a
footnote to Hume's dialogues. If I had to, if you could only
read one other one, I would readThe Miracle Theism by JL Mackey.
I think that's the most rigorousanalytic work of analytic

(01:04:44):
philosophy in the atheist tradition that's still
accessible. So don't get me wrong, there's a
lot to be technical that that's technical in JL Mackey's The
Miracle Theism, but it's not so technical that you couldn't read
something like the dialogues andthen follow it up with JL
Mackey. But if you're looking for the

(01:05:04):
best work of atheist philosophy ever written in the analytic
tradition, any tradition, period, it's kind of the final
boss of atheism is Logic and Theism by JH Sobel.
So Sobel is a logician and he isprobably one of the most

(01:05:26):
important logicians of the 20th century.
And so I think this book came out in like 2004, and it's kind
of his master class, very, very technical, don't get me wrong.
But I think as far as atheistic works go, it is the most
comprehensive, the most thoroughand the most forceful defense of

(01:05:48):
atheism that you can find. I don't think anyone has matched
SO though yet. Thank you so much.
Super helpful. Benjamin Watkins, you gave up
some of your night to hang out with us.
Thank you for taking the time. Thanks for sharing that with us.
I'll post some links when this video goes up where you can, you
can follow Ben online. And and also what what people

(01:06:12):
didn't get to see is before this, it took us like 20 minutes
to get set up and we were havingtechnical difficulties and we
were doing old school dial up and it was beeping in our ear.
But we figured it out. So I appreciate you taking the
time and thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me,
this was a blast. I hope look forward to doing
something similar in the future.Awesome.

(01:06:32):
Listen, if I'm in Virginia, I'llhit you up if you're ever in
Dallas, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll get you a glass of pappies or
something. We'll, we'll have something fun.
So. Absolutely.
Please do. Awesome.
Well, thank you so much again and thank you for everybody
tuning in and we will see you onideological next time.